'I'm an abortion travel agent' and other tales from Texas' new desert
Last edited Sat Feb 27, 2016, 05:13 AM - Edit history (1)
Source: cnn
Austin, Texas (CNN)Daytime turns to dusk as Natalie St. Clair's phone lights up with text messages. They come from clients across the vast Lone Star State.
One needs a bus from Texarkana to Shreveport, Louisiana. Another traveling from Corpus Christi to San Antonio has to find a hotel room. A third must get to Fort Worth from a small town in the western part of the state. A fourth reaches out from Lubbock to say she missed her appointment in Dallas.
To the stranger at a party who asks what she does, St. Clair keeps her answer vague: "Just feminist stuff." But the truth is blunt, bold and a sign of the times: "I'm an abortion travel agent."
It's a job that emerged after Texas enacted House Bill 2 in 2013, imposing a new round of restrictions on abortion care and abortion providers. Two key parts of the law have been challenged all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which hears arguments in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt on Wednesday.
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Enter Fund Texas Choice, where St. Clair, 23, works as the operations manager and is the organization's only full-time employee. While other funds have helped pay for abortions for decades, this one answers a different call necessitated by HB2. It's for anyone who doesn't have a vehicle or must drive two hours or more on their own to reach a clinic.
Working out of an office in Austin, St. Clair often wires women gas money. (PayPal would be easier, but it requires a bank account, something many clients don't have.) In rural parts of Texas, just getting that wired money can require travel across multiple towns to reach a MoneyGram at Walmart. She books flights, taxis, bus tickets and hotel rooms. She regularly studies Greyhound routes and bookmarks airline schedules. Once she drove 3½ hours one-way to hand deliver last-minute financial help.
She tells stories of women who offer to sleep in their cars. Hell will freeze over, she says, before she'll let that happen.
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/26/health/texas-abortion-access-desert/index.html
College students, addicts who don't believe they are fit to be mothers and women who already had children would pull into the parking lot. Martinez remembers them arriving in cabs, old jalopies and fancy SUVs — some even with McCain/Palin bumper stickers.
Women who might rail against abortion in their social circles, she says, were happy to accept Planned Parenthood's services once they got pregnant.[/
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Long detailed eye opening article!!! 😔😥
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